Perhaps in jazz most of all, things have a way of falling into place. In April 2014, the Dallas Museum of Art approached Stockton Helbing to compose a suite in honor of modernist jewelry artist Arthur Smith. During his research Helbing learned that Smith maintained a small shop for over 30 years on West 4th Street, in New York’s West Village. Just a block away at the Blue Note on West 3rd, Helbing had gained formative experience playing with the late trumpeter and big band leader Maynard Ferguson. Though the Museum didn’t exactly foresee it, Helbing was just the guy to portray Smith’s artistic backyard through the medium of music. “Maynard hired me right out of North Texas,” says Helbing, “and I spent nearly four years touring the world with him. I owe so many things in my life to his generosity. We would spend a couple of weeks every year playing at the Blue Note. I love walking around the Village and going to the Vanguard, Smalls, the 55 Bar, all those clubs. I love the atmosphere down there, and I wanted to focus on its uniqueness.” The result is On West 4th Street, the five-movement suite that forms the centerpiece of Patina, Helbing’s sixth album as a leader. Arthur Smith was influenced by “surrealism, biomorphicism, and primitivism,” according to the catalog of the Brooklyn Museum exhibit From the Village to Vogue. When he wasn’t making his extraordinary jewelry, he often haunted the jazz clubs in the West Village, just like Helbing. One of his finest necklaces, from 1962, is called “Ellington.” Other pieces are named after jazz standards such as “Autumn Leaves.” “Patina,” one of his best-known works, was inspired by sculptor and mobile-maker Alexander Calder. Helbing named three other movements “Copper,” “Silver” and “Gold” after the metals Smith worked with most frequently. In addition to the suite, there are four more Helbing originals, three of which — “Cool Man Jack,” “Crazy Aquarius” and “Handprints” — have appeared on previous albums. The big difference here is the chordless setting, a choice Helbing made partly out of necessity: the venue where he premiered the suite did not have a piano. “The time period when Arthur Smith was active seemed to coincide with some of my favorite music from the late ’50s and early ’60s,” the drummer says. “I always loved those old Sonny Rollins records, like the very first record ever cut at the Village Vanguard, which was his trio and it was chordless. So I thought it would be great to have the airiness of the chordless trio, and it ended up shaping the rest of the album.” There was another twist as well: the Museum commissioned the Dallas Black Dance Theater to choreograph original dances for three of Helbing’s movements (“Copper,” “Patina” and “On West 4th Street”). “I was like, ‘Ok, this just got real complicated,’” Helbing says with a laugh. The challenges only grew, in fact: the dance movements were supposed to have no improvisatory element. “They gave me very specific timings, specific tempos, specific lengths, and no improvisation. There were all these crazy moving parts. Right off the bat this made it sound really different than my previous projects.” But different as it is, Patina is anchored by the presence of bassist James Driscoll and tenor saxophonist David Lown, both North Texas alums who’ve appeared on several of Helbing’s previous outings. Lown appears only on the four non-suite tracks, pairing up with fellow tenor Shelley Carrol in a dialogue full of depth and swing. Carrol takes center stage on the suite, playing with fire and authority in a highly exposed trio mode. “Shelley is our local jazz legend here in Dallas right now,” Helbing says. “He’s the most recent in the historic lineage of Texas tenors. I used to play with him when I was in school, he would hire me for gigs when I was a kid at North Texas. There’s a fearlessness to his playing and he oozes individuality. He plays every gig like it’s going to be his last — it’s just full commitment to the music all the time. I knew that on this trio stuff, with three movements of me just writing melodic content, I needed someone who could interpret it in a way that individualized it and made it sound improvisatory.” There’s a strong blues theme on the album, whether it’s hints of “All Blues” heard in “Copper,” the slow-burning 5/4 tempo of “Gold,” the Eddie Harris-like strut of the opening “Turtle Tank Blues” or the funk-rock blast of the finale “Crazy Aquarius” (those last two inspired by the Helbing family’s pet turtle). “I shied away from delving into the fundamentals of the blues sound for a long time,” Helbing explains. “But the roots of jazz are in the blues tradition, and being creative with that short form that’s resetting constantly. I wanted to incorporate that into things I was writing. Good grief, if John Coltrane can record a whole album of blues, I have no right not to play the blues more often. Because that’s what my heroes did.” There’s also a minor-key mood that Helbing taps into on “Cool Man Jack” (dedicated to the family dog) and “On West 4th Street.” “Handprints,” the title track of Helbing’s previous CD, gets its quasi-Eastern feel from the leader playing drums entirely with his hands, “exploring the softer spectrum of dynamics, focusing on texture and timbre rather than on volume and density of improvisation.” Revisiting one’s earlier pieces is something that sits firmly within the tradition, as Helbing notes of his youthful pursuit of different Dizzy Gillespie versions of “Night in Tunisia.” “Both James and David [Lown], they’ve played these tunes with me a lot, but Shelley had never played them,” he says. “It was really fun to see where they went. If I remember correctly they’re all first takes. It was a musical chemistry experiment to insert a musician as great as Shelley into the mix of the three of us, who have a lot of mileage together. They went places they’d never gone before.” David R. Adler New York, November 2014